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Truth & Virginia Woolf, "The sick room and body map onto each…

- - - - Continuity and change
        
        PRESERVATION
        
        Perception versus reality
        
        Subjectivity
        
        "The Sense of Unending: Revisiting Woolf's Orlando":
        By posing that the ending of Orlando is more like the beginning of the reader's interpretation than the ending of the author's canonical truth, Micir alludes to the inherent subjectivity of literature.
        
        "This is all here, however implicitly, in the novel’s final pages. But what if Orlando’s story does not end with the close of the book? What if attending to whatever we find “beyond the ending” is not only a writerly practice but a readerly responsibility, too?" (Micir, 111).
        
        "Three Guineas":
        When thinking critically about "Three Guineas", it becomes apparent that there is some sense of hypocrisy present in Woolf's argument. What do the societal restrictions placed on Woolf's sex say about the validity of her argument? What does her argument say about the intersectionality of all things, not just issues of sexism and war? What does the existence of this text say about who/who else gets to comment on things which are societally deemed inaccessible to them because of their identity?
        
        Preconception of what is truth
        
        Limitations of societal constructions
        
        Orlando:
        Woolf turns the constrictions of the social concept of the gender binary on its head in Orlando.
        In playing with the concept of Orlando's gender in the way that she does, Woolf is able to undermine the limitations of a strictly male/female binary.
        
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        "A Room of One's Own":
        This essay is a commentary on who is given the space to write/preconception of what an "author" looks like.
        How does society choose whose intellectual property has value? How does this relate to author's identity?
        
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        "Three Guineas":
        Woolf emphasizes the importance of her identity in terms of how it impacts her personal truth/opinions on societal matters.
        This commentary broke the stigma at the time for who was/was allowed to be involved in conversations surrounding war.
        
        Mrs. Dalloway:
        Woolf's incorporation of Mrs. Dalloway's complex relationship with Sally serves to display the heteronormative nature of society at that time. Rather than a non-platonic relationship even being perceived as possible (both by other parties and by themselves), Sally and Clarissa were influenced to maintain a strictly platonic dynamic despite their implied true feelings.
        This relationship was also not perceived as anything more than platonic by some who read the text, adding another strengthening layer to Woolf's commentary about the heteronormative society she lived in. In opposition to this, some of those that did recognize the underlying nature of this relationship at the time were deeply unsettled by it and, for that reason, Mrs. Dalloway was a banned book in some communities.
        
        "Mrs. Dalloway and the Social System":
        This essay centers around Woolf's desire to criticize the social system of her society by writing Mrs. Dalloway. By revealing these intentions, Zwerdling is able to synthesize their own preconceptions of the shortcomings of this social system with Woolf's own.
        Zwerdling goes into depth on many of the different facets of this social structure, especially in terms of the reliance it had on the complacency of groups which were perceived by those in power to be less capable. In tandem with this, they also reveal Woolf's intentions of showcasing this social system for what it is. In this essay, Zwerdling implies that Woolf believed the best way to criticize this flawed system was to create a place for it to function exactly as it was intended to.
        
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        "The Sense of Unending: Revisiting Woolf's Orlando":
        By exploring the possibilities of expanding the narrative world of Orlando past the text's ending, Micir is effectively pushing the limits of the preconceived interpretation of this text.
        The author alludes to the fact that Woolf exhausts the main assumed plot arc of most books about women at the time (being marriage) long before the text comes to an end. In doing this, Woolf opens up a plethora of directions in which Orlando can progress outside of the expected plotline desired by society.
        
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        "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens":
        In this essay, Walker takes the ideas presented by Virginia Woolf in "A Room of One's Own" and applies them to black women in the south living in the age of slavery. By highlighting this group of marginalized people, Walker calls into question the extent to which Woolf's essay was effective in posing questions about who is allowed space to write. In expanding on Woolf's original text in this essay, Walker criticizes the boundaries which confined the preconceptions generated by Woolf's personal truth about who should have access to authorship--about whose voices deserve to be shared.
        
        What is and what isn't in our control?
        
        Passage of time
        
        Aging
        
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        To the Lighthouse:
        The second section ("Time Passes") of To the Lighthouse is an excellent example of the ways in which Woolf likes to play with the passage of time in a great number of her works.
        
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        "On Seeing Illness: Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway":
        After living through bouts of influenza, both Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf's own worlds were changed. Outka centers this essay around the exploration of how coping with illness can alter one's perception of the world around them.
        
        To the Lighthouse:
        Woolf plays with the relationship between perception and reality in this novel primarily through the view of Lily Briscoe. While creating her paintings, Briscoe is often left frustrated because she is met with difficulty when attempting to translate her altered vision of the world around her onto the canvas. Rather than seeing their world as the other characters do, she views it through the abstract lens of an impressionist.
        
        "Such she often felt herself--struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: ‘But this is what I see; this is what I see,’ and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her” (To the Lighthouse,19).
        
        "Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World":
        This essay centers around Woolf's perceptions of our Universe in the context of many widely accepted scientific findings which are intended to explain the nature of our reality through logic.
        
        "At the same time as she wrote against sterile
        systems of logic, however, Woolf also recognized the efficacy of science and mathematics in opening windows upon the workings of Nature" (Westling, 855).
        
        Preservation of self
        
        Mrs. Dalloway:
        Mrs. Dalloway attempts to maintain her youth and lively character in spite of the fact that she is aging. Clarissa bases a lot of her identity off of being "the perfect hostess" and, subsequently, attempts to preserve her lively and joyful character despite the many years that have passed since she was in her youth.
        
        The Hours:
        In this film, Richard Brown is portrayed as a very ill man fighting for his life. It appears as though Clarissa comes over frequently in order to ensure that Brown takes his medication and takes care of himself properly. However, Brown is only content with sustaining his life because that is what Clarissa wants. Brown continues to preserve himself day by day through medication, sustenance, and poetry in order to keep Clarissa happy. Eventually, he can't bear to preserve himself any longer and takes his own life.
        
        Orlando (the film):
        By having the same actress play Orlando both while they were a man and as a woman, the director of the film Orlando is able to hint at the fact that despite their changes in sex, Orlando fundamentally remained the same person over time.
        
        "On Seeing Illness: Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway":
        This essay focuses on the effects of preserving oneself during bouts of illness. Outka brings up the similarities between war and illness Woolf draws in her own essay "On Being Ill". By highlighting these conclusions in conjunction with conversations of the effects of illness on Woolf's own life, Outka is able to reveal the critical ways that illness manifests itself in Woolf's texts. Specifically, when commentating on the relationship between illness and war which Woolf constructs, Outka alludes to the fact that persevering not only through but beyond illness is a test of physical, mental, and emotional fortitude. In order to preserve one's identity through illness, one must be able to overcome the havoc illness wreaks on life.
        
        "Seeing illness, then, requires a new paradigm, a way of seeing the world through the body and acknowledging that the mind’s perceptions are inextricably tangled with that body. Woolf attempted precisely this vision in Mrs. Dalloway. Here, though, she suggests all the elements that make representing this perspective so difficult: the body’s unpredictable nature, its powerlessness, its isolation, and the knowledge that in this war, there are only solitary soldiers against encroaching, intangible enemies" (Outka, 109).
        
        Preservation through art
        
        Orlando:
        Orlando attempts to preserve the essence of their life through "The Oak Tree".
        Orlando destroys all their other manuscripts, effectively erasing the majority of their creative truth.
        
        To the Lighthouse:
        Lily Briscoe preserves scenes of life in paint. Rather than painting conventional portraits, Lily creates abstract scenes which are representative of the "truth" of the moment which she sees.
        
        "A Room of One's Own":
        Woolf describes the process of preserving female thought through creating literature. This is especially important because of the lack of female representation in literature at the time Woolf wrote this essay.
        By encouraging more women to take up writing, Woolf is effectively looking for a way to preserve their feminine experience in time. This would only lead to a larger representation of women in literature in the future--a concrete compilation of evidence that women were just as present just as men were.
        
        Mrs. Dalloway:
        Septimus Smith uses poetry as a way to preserve his story. Despite the incommunicability of his afflictions, Septimus uses poetry as a means to temporarily heal and sustain himself. In this way, art acts as a way for Septimus to preserve himself both during the present in life and later in death.
        
        The Hours:
        In this film, Richard Brown is a renowned poet who uses his art form as a means of encapsulating the complexities of his internal struggles.
        Towards the end of the film, it becomes clear that Smith is writing poetry more as a means of preserving his essence in an attempt to please Clarissa more than anything else. This is because although Septimus is prepared to die, Clarissa does everything in her power to keep him alive. By continuing to write per her wishes, Septimus is effectively eternalizing himself in order to keep his memory alive for Clarissa after he takes his own life.
        
        "What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness" (The Hours,18.53).
        
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        To the Lighthouse:
        Despite the fact that a decade has gone by, when Lily Briscoe and others return to the Ramsay family home on the Isle of Skye, they conclude that it looks just the same as it once did. In spite of all of the changes life had brought about amidst the family's dynamic, Woolf makes it a point to emphasize the sentiment that the place itself--its essence--has remained unchanged.
        
        “Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look” (To the Lighthouse, 142).
        
        Orlando:
        One of Orlando's principle obsessions as a text is the ideas of continuity and change. More specifically, Woolf utilizes this novel as a space to explore the dynamic between how things are altered or preserved by time, experience, and growth.
        Woolf explores this dynamic in a number of ways, the most obvious of which being Orlando's sex. However, she also focuses on the changing nature of Orlando's love life, their manuscript "The Oak Tree", and their perception of the world around them in order to delve deeper into this topic.
        
        "A Room of One's Own":
        In this essay, Woolf considers the ways in which the landscape of literature would change with the normalization of women becoming authors. In centering her argument around the longstanding preconceptions of what an author looks like/who gets to be an author, Woolf is able to directly commentate on how diversification of authorship would both alter and strengthen the field of literature.
      - Orlando:
        Despite the various fluctuations of Orlando's gender throughout the course of their life, Woolf makes it a point to emphasize the fact that Orlando always remained true to their identity regardless of whether they were perceived by society as a man or a woman. Further, Woolf suggested that the changes of Orlando's gender and sex had no real impact on the essence of their person.
        
        "Orlando had become a woman--there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity" (Orlando, 138).
      - The Hours:
        Richard Brown is arguably one of the most conflicted and complex characters in The Hours. Despite the shared desires of Clarissa and others close to him, there comes a point where Brown loses both the motivation to write and his will to live. Rather than continuing on to appease Clarissa, in an act of acknowledging the depths of his inner truth, Brown takes his own life.
        In a similar way, the portrayal of Woolf herself in the movie undergoes a similar return to her own internal truth. The film opens with the scene of Woolf's suicide. Later it is revealed that Woolf had been going through the motions of life for quite some time. In the film, instead of recognizing and coping with her internal afflictions, Woolf continues to lead her life as normal so that she doesn't worry her husband and the others around her, acting as if her condition is improving. This cycle led to Woolf eventually succumbing to the harsh truth of her desires and taking her own life as well.
        A third character, Laura Brown, also goes on to attempt to take her own life while pregnant with her son, Richard Brown. This is because she was largely dissatisfied in the life she was leading. Brown wished to be able to explore her sexuality, but was restrained from doing so by societal norms at the time. Due to the feelings of inauthenticity she had while remaining in her marriage and as a housewife, she decided to attempt suicide.
      - Mrs. Dalloway:
        Throughout the middle part of Mrs. Dalloway's life, she is intent on maintaining her status as "the perfect hostess". By placing so much value on the role which she has always played in terms of contributing to society, Clarissa demonstrates the desire to preserve oneself despite the passing of time/aging/sickness.
      - "Three Guineas":
        When formulating her response to the question "how can we prevent war?" Woolf asserts that she is incapable of providing an answer without first addressing the systematic disparities at play with this query and her identity. Woolf explores this question in tandem with the impact of her womanhood on the ability she has to comment on certain issues (such as war) in the context of society. In doing this, Woolf emphasizes the intersectionality of these issues (being war and sexism), while asserting that she is unable to ignore one part of her identity, being her sex, while advocating for the other, being her anti-war ideologies.
      - "On Seeing Illness: Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway":
        In this essay, Outka alludes to the fact that illness has the ability to shape the identity and perspective of the person it is afflicting. After enduring a bout of illness, one is understandably altered by their experience. This is especially true when considering life-threatening illnesses, such as influenza.
        After experiencing influenza, Clarissa emerges from her sick room as a different person. Only by embracing the changes her mind and body have gone through because of this illness can Clarissa continue on as a full version of herself.
    - - "And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of both" (Orlando, 158).
  - - - "She was not yet finished, but she could not go on. And although virtually everything—not just Between the Acts but her diaries, letters, stories, and essays, too—would eventually be collected and published, her suicide on March 28, 1941, cast a shadow of unfinishedness over the history of modernism, and queer feminist modernism, in particular. What else might she have written? What else might we have inherited? In this chapter, I return to Woolf’s most legendary passion project— Orlando, her 1928 'biography' of her lover, Vita Sackville-West—in order to suggest that even finished, published books might sometimes prompt us to read them in light of what I call the unfinished aesthetic of queer feminist modernism. Learning to read Orlando this way is to learn to read beyond its ending" (Micir, 110).
  - - - "And I remember people coming to my mother's yard to be given cuttings from her flowers; I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity, that to this day people drive by our house in Georgia-perfect strangers and imperfect strangers-and ask to stand or walk among my mother's art" (Walker, 408).
  - - - "Increasingly she sought to portray the non human, or what David Abram calls the 'more than human' world within which we are tiny and only momentary presences. Her experiments with point of view and narrative structure absorb the epistemological lessons of relativity, wave theory, and the interdependency of observer and phenomena observed from quantum physics into a new fictional ontology that reaches its most radical form in her final novel, Between the Acts. As Michelle Pridmore-Brown explains, there Woolf presents a vision of the world 'as a pulsating field of mind and matter in which everything is interconnected' (WG 411)" (Westling, 856).